According to a statement on the company’s website, the time has come to “wind down” operations. A recent rumor pointed to a possible Google acquisition of Lytro, but it looks like Google is only interested in snapping up the company’s engineers.

Light field pioneer Lytro is reportedly in talks to be acquired by Google for pennies on the dollar. Google will get a lot of talent and a bevy of patents to add to its VR content creation and computational imaging efforts.

Silicon Valley has no shortage of startups that have planned to revolutionize photography using computational imaging. But one of the oldest startups of them all, Apple, aims to be one of the first to get a mass market product out the door.

With its efforts to create a market for consumer and professional light field cameras stalled, Lytro has moved into using its unique technology to create an ultra-high-end system for VR video content creation with its planned Immerge system.

After the beating it took trying to sell 3D TVs that required special glasses, you’d think the industry would be hesitant to jump into goggle-using VR, but it’s going in full speed — and it could salvage the 3D TV market.

Lytro, after admitting that its overly expensive, low-resolution light field camera was merely a “novelty,” has announced its new Illum camera. The Illum is much larger than its predecessor, packing a sensor that’s four times the size (40 “megarays”), and an appropriately larger lens in front of that sensor (though the same 8x optical zoom and f/2.0 aperture remain). The Illum also looks a lot like a real DSLR, rather than the rather odd pocket kaleidoscopesque appearance of the original Lytro Camera. The Lytro Illum will be available in July 2014 at a retail price of $1600.

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